Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Remember video cassette players and how they produced funny, hurried-up versions of videos and music when the tape was sped up with the Play button turned on? The high pitched, shrill voices were amusing to hear. Some music cassette players also had such features.

While speeding up a music file sounds comical, slowing it down produces a completely opposite effect. Listen to the theme music from the movie Jurassic Park slowed down by 1000%.

Amazing ambience.

Software media players allow playback of media files at varying speed, at least, VLC Media Player does. But they produce heavy, hollow or at times robotic sound when played back at a slow pace.

Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch, on the other hand, allows extreme stretching of sound files without losing the pitch of the sound or sounding digital and broken. In fact, the Jurassic Park Theme you hear above was created using this very program.

Instead of simply stretching the entire song, Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch takes small chunks (usually around 100 milliseconds) of the audio file and then smears it - first analyze the chunk's sound frequencies, then randomize a part of the sounds characteristics and rebuild the chunk. The recreated chunks are then placed next to each other to elongate the track.

Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch has three modes:

The "Stretch" mode - may stretch up to 10,000 times

The "HyperStretch" mode - may stretch up to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times (10^18)

The "Shorten" mode - it reduces the length of the sound

The program offers a truckload of controls for different parameters, all of which affect the output. There are Bandpass / Lowpass / Highpass / Bandstop / Smooth filters, Frequency changer, Pitch changer, Harmonics removal filter, Noise filter and others. These are briefly explained in the program’s website.

If you are unsure, you can leave them untouched and only adjust the stretch. I used the program to stretch Max Payne’s theme music 10x times, or by 1000%. This is how it sounds.